Firefox: Serenity Now
by uo-chou
Summary: Entombed in crystal, Naruto sleeps for millenia. He awakens in the future, far from earth in a system filled with dozens of planets and hundreds of moons, controlled by a powerful Alliance. Good thing a certain crew is hiring. Naruto/Firefly Xover.
1. Chapter 1

Firefox: _Serenity Now_

A Naruto Tale

Nineteen year old Uzumaki Naruto opened his eyes, wondering just what in the hell had happened. He could vaguely make out that he was in a lighted room, but couldn't tell where he was, he could hardly see at all. His eyes felt like they were crusted shut, and his throat felt like a desert. He tried to lift his arm, but couldn't—he was so weak that even the attempt tired him so much he was afraid to try again. He sensed people around him, and he knew they were doing something to him. He could almost feel them touching his skin, doing things to his unresponsive body. It was like his entire body was experiencing the numbness of a leg that had fallen asleep. Then he thought no more for a long while, as oblivion once again took him.

Naruto woke again, feeling… He couldn't say he was feeling better, as before he had hardly felt anything at all, and now he felt pain almost everywhere. The cold pain of a limb left unprotected too long in freezing weather. He could feel though, and that was something. He could hear, too, and he was sure he would have been able to see if it wasn't for the blindfold obscuring his face. Having had his sight obscured before, he recognized the sensation. He felt not-so soft sheets below him, and smelt the antiseptic odor synonymous with hospitals. He heard almost nothing, save for the quiet hum of small electronics doing their job well. He tried to move, and managed to wiggle a bit, quickly finding that he was restrained. Naruto couldn't imagine why Konoha would tie down one of their own ninjas, so he imagined he was in an enemy village. He vaguely remembered being on a mission before whatever terrible event has caused him so much damage, but his memories were cloudy, and he couldn't quite focus. He relaxed. He was still so tired. It would all make sense in time.

A voice spoke, questioning, in some strange foreign tongue he couldn't begin to make sense of. The light warmth of skin briefly touching skin was felt on his hand, and then disappeared. He groaned, his raw throat protesting the action. His eyelids rose, and his was assaulted with visual input for the first time since this ordeal had first begun. Naruto couldn't move his head, but his eyes drank in as much of the room he found himself in as possible, his acute peripheral vision providing him with extra details. The room was sparse, white, and totally immaculate, the kind of room his surrogate-grandmother Tsunade demanded from Konoha's hospital. And yet, he knew in the first two seconds that he wasn't in Konoha. He wondered if he was in the elemental nations at all. Light radiated from the ceilings, lights like he had never seen before. The incandescent light bulb had only been discovered a few decades before Naruto was born, and no one, to his knowledge, had come up with anything better so far. These lights seemed to be built into the ceiling, and radiated a cool white light. The walls had computers built into them, he only recognized them from his time in the Star country. The few computers present in the elemental nations had been painstakingly reconstructed from pieces of ancient relics found in sites occupied by the great ancestors before the days of fire and plague. These machines were sparklingly new, and functioned perfectly, not like anything else he had ever seen. And the woman standing next to him, speaking to him in that odd language… She was the strangest of all. She was short, only about a meter and half tall, he guessed, and was dressed in some sort of protective garment which included a helmet. He looked down, it was her hand that had touched his before, but she was wearing some kind of glove that mimicked the feeling of flesh. He wondered briefly why a medic would be dressed like that. Was he contaminated with some sort of poison? His mind raced for a moment longer, before he simply decided to accept his current predicament at face value and wait to see what happened next.

The woman finally noticed that he was awake, and a radiant smile spread across her face. She exclaimed something in that odd language of hers, and pressed a small button embedded into the wall next to his bed. A mail voice erupted from the wall, and the woman answered it. The language barrier was going to get annoying fast, realized Naruto. The woman finished her conversation with the wall, and turned again to face the young ninja. She spoke to him softly, and gestured for him to respond. Naruto tried to speak, but his throat was too dry. He erupted into a wracking cough. The woman produced a small cup of water, and proceeded to help him drink it. The tepid, sterile liquid was the best thing Naruto had ever drunk.

Naruto tried again to speak, "H-hi.," he said, "Where am I?" He winced. God, he sounded weak. The woman cocked her head at him, then spoke again. He still couldn't understand her words, but they sounded more like real speech now, not the odd sounds she had been making earlier. He realized she had switched languages. He thought he almost recognized a few words she used, but gave it up as a bad job after a few minutes. She finally stopped speaking when she realized his confusion. She gestured as him again. "Well, my name is Uzumaki Naruto. I guess you already know that… or not? I have no clue where I am, or why you brought me here. I don't know what you hope to gain from this, but I'm in line to become Hokage, and Konoha won't take kindly to you imprisoning me."

The woman followed his words closely, he gaze intent. The grate erupted again, and there was one word he recognized from it, "Nihon-go". It was the name of the language spoken in all of the elemental countries. The woman looked startled for a moment, then shook her head, smiling. She wagged her finger at him as if her were an errant child, then turned about and left the room. Naruto had no clue what was happening, though he recognized that they had identified the language he was speaking. He guessed that they would eventually send in someone who spoke it.

He was right. Two days later, endless, bored, monotonous days which felt like weeks, they sent in a man dressed in one of those wacky suits that everyone around her wore. Naruto guessed this man was special, because he didn't have a plate of tasteless food which smelled like cardboard or a syringe filled with drugs that made him sleep, or another fucking bedpan. He carried a small personal computer and looked older than God.

"Did they send you to clean my asshole, or to feed me more of the pig-shit that they call food?" asked the disgruntled ninja, his face set into a scowl.

"Neither," responded the old man, in perfect Japanese, "They sent me in because I speak your language." Naruto goggled.

"Finally!" shouted the overactive blonde. "I've been trying to talk to these other people forever, but no one understands my speech. I'm in a foreign land, aren't I? How far did you fuckers take me from the Land of Fire, anyway! The Hokage will track me down, she's my adoptive grandmother, after all. You had better let me go."

The old man's eyes lit up, though he looked quite puzzled. "I don't even know where this "Fire Land" is located. If you let me, I'll explain the circumstances of your being here as best as I can, and after that I'll be translating for the people who run this place." The old man's wrinkled skull contorted in thought. "Though, I'm not sure I believe even half of what they told me about you…"

Naruto growled. "Please, explain the situation to me." His face went rigid.

The old man smiled. "First, let me introduce myself. My name is Wu Hiro. I am a professor of anthropology and ancient language. I was asked to translate for you, as I am one of only about one hundred people alive who speak Japanese.." Naruto's face remained a mask of stone. "You are in this place, because it is a hospital, and you were near death when you were found. You are also in this place because it is a military hospital, and our hosts do not know if you are dangerous or not. Another reason you are in this place is that no one seems to know what you really are, and the authorities don't know what to do with you." The bald gentleman paused for a moment, then continued. "I don't know how to tell you the next part so that you will believe me, so I will first ask you a question. What is the last thing that you remember, before waking up here?"

Naruto had been asking himself this same question for the past two days. He thought he had a pretty good answer, but it troubled him, because it was totally insane. He had been on a mission in Bird Country, to rid a village of a particularly large band of mercenaries, rumored to contain a few low ranking ninja. As the top Jounin in Konoha, it was nothing he couldn't handle. Except that the intelligence department had made a huge mistake. The gang included at least four A-rank ninja, one of whom was a user of the extremely rare crystal element techniques. Another of them had been a genjutsu user, his absolute worst weakness. With all four of them attacking at once, he was unable to stop the genjutsu user before he found himself trapped in a particularly powerful illusion. Nothing compared to Itachi or Madara's _Tsukoyomi_, but it did the job. After the genjutsu took hold, he felt was his skin being coated in crystal, then nothing. His next memory was waking up here.

Still, this man was a foreigner and possibly an enemy, so Naruto decided to play his cards close to his vest. "I don't exactly remember… I think I might have passed out?" He knew that he sounded convincing, he wasn't a ninja for nothing. He had been taking lessons in subterfuge for years now, learning from the best in preparation to take Tsunade's job from her.

The old man nodded, "Well, something happened alright. If you don't know what occurred, then no one alive does. Two years ago, a collector of rare antiquities died, and his collection was donated to a museum. Part of the collection was a crystal larger than a man, a type of crystal never seen before. The museum allowed scientists to study the crystal, and it was found to be hollow. Subsequent tests indicated that something was inside of it… Something that several of them believed was alive. Their best guess was that the crystal was some sort of life-support device, though it contained no power source they could find. Eventually, after thirteen years of study, they decided to open the crystal. Inside… was you."

Naruto shuddered. Looking at Hiro, he knew the old man spoke the truth. "How long… Where am I?" He could barely speak.

The ancient professor hesitated, "They tested the crystal. There is a method to tell how old an object is, called carbon dating. It's between 1,500-2,500 years old. I don't know if this will mean anything to you, but this is the year 2515, and you are on a planet called Ariel, in a planetary system know as The Verse. Earth, you planet and the homeworld of humanity, was abandoned over four hundred years ago."

Naruto fainted.

~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~

Author's Note: So, yeah. I don't think there's a Naruto/Firefly crossover out there, so I made one. If I'm wrong, please give me a link. I have a rough outline of what I have planned for his story, but I wouldn't be adverse to some input. I think it's safe to say that at some point our resident jinchurikki will run into the beloved crew of a certain freighter ship. Mischief will surely ensue. I'm pretty excited about this fic, and it's my first crossover, so please review if you want me to continue it.


	2. Chapter 2

Firefox: Serenity Now

A Naruto Tale

Chapter II: Cold Hard Reality

Uzumaki Naruto was not a happy camper, and he hadn't been for a long time. He had spent just over a year in the "hospital" on Ariel, having every test he could conceive of performed on him, and twice as many as that which he could never have conceived of. Every day suited men and women took his temperature, measured his reflexes, they had him constantly connected to a machine which measured his brain waves, and they even took his blood. He had to constantly use breathing exercises which Jiraya had taught him to keep calm throughout it. As much as he disliked these tests, he knew that trying to escape would be suicide. He had learned early on that the men and women that made up "The Alliance" knew nothing of chakra or its multifaceted applications. He decided to tell them nothing of his special abilities, choosing to instead pretend he was an ignorant villager who had been attacked, claiming he knew nothing of how he found himself here.

There were a few positive points in this crazy new world. Every day Wu Hiro would come, translating the questions his captors had for him. Their inquiries mostly related to how people lived their lives in his time. He decided to omit everything about ninjas and chakra. They seemed to expect him to be confused about commonplace things from his own time like steam power and television, so he omitted anything having to do with technology more complicated than a garden ho. After a while the questions became repetitive, and then they petered out and stopped altogether. Naruto guessed the cultural anthro-thingies or whatever they were had become bored with him. He couldn't blame them, his answers bored even himself, he had planned it that way. He knew if they found something unique or interesting about him they would never let him go. During the many hours each day that they weren't poking him with needles or pumping him for information, Naruto learned about his new world. Or worlds, to be more precise. There seemed to be as many worlds in "The Verse" as there were countries on the elemental continent, and the sheer number of people living her staggered him. He was able to learn these things, as Wu Hiro had been tutoring him in the two most common languages in The Verse, Chinese and English. Several of the words in Chinese sounded remarkably like those in his native tongue, and his progress skyrocketed when he found, to his incredible amazement, that Japanese and Chinese shared a common syllabary, called kanji. Focusing almost every waking moment, he was able to learn to speak and read Chinese and English with a reasonable proficiency in less than six months. There was something to be said for the immersion method.

He also learned about space travel, a subject which was incredibly fascinating to him. In his old world, Naruto had been almost rabidly obsessed with personal power, comparing his own strength to everyone around him, and trying to constantly better himself. True, his motives for doing this were completely altruistic; He only wanted power so that he could become Hokage and protect all of his precious people. But, still he had been fairly obsessed with power. In the elemental nations, ninjas equaled power. Ninja were the supreme warriors, masters of the battlefield, and the deciders of war. Even a raw genin was the match for at least a dozen regular soldiers. Here, they had weapons capable of killing anyone and everyone in a radius of square miles, with the push of a button. They had devices which could track people better than the most sensitive Inazuka nose, or the strongest Byakugan. They had machines that could travel farther and faster than all ninjas combined, since the dawn of time. Naruto was first frightened, and then awed by these feats of technology. He furiously learned about these things, using the limited read-only terminal they provided him in his room as much as they would permit him. He wished that he could use the Kage Bunshin technique, as it would have been extremely useful.

Around fourteen months after he had arrived, they allowed him out of his room, and into the common areas of the hospital. Previously, they had only allowed him out in a private exercise area, where he got one hour of time each day to stretch his legs and get some sunlight. He hated the small, fenced yard with a passion. If the demon in his belly didn't make losing muscle mass impossible, he would be fat and out of shape by now. For once he was glad of its presence. The common areas of the hospital included a gym and basketball court, a swimming pool, two cafeterias, and a recreation room stocked with a three dimensional television, board games, and art supplies. The patients, for the most part, looked and acted like zombies. At first Naruto thought they were just mentally the mentally ill, but so many of them were so young, younger even than him. Most of them refused to talk to him outright, and many of the rest were too insane or emotional to hold a decent conversation. There were exceptions, of course.

About a week after they started letting him out, Naruto met a girl. She was short, and lithe like a dancer. Her dark hair swirled around her head in a nebulous cloud, alternately hiding and enhancing her beauty. Seeing her sitting by herself in the recreation room, he decided to try and talk with her.

Naruto smiled as he approached the girl, leaving his empty hands at his sides. He had learned that some of the patients tended to get violent if they thought he was hostile. He took a seat beside the girl, at the small plastic table she was sitting at. "Hello, my name is Naruto," he said, "it's nice to meet you."

The girl looked him directly in the eyes, then shook her head, and stared down at the table for a moment. She frowned, and then looked back up at the blond ninja. This time her gaze was piercing, boring into the depths of his soul. "Fishcake, they named you fishcake" She shook a little bit, then cocked her head to the side sharply "Son of number four, but you're number is nine…" Naruto's eyes widened and his breath got caught in his throat. River continued, "From the past, the past, a past, fire, leaves, I see talking snakes and frogs…" the young girl trailed off, he eyes once again pointed downward.

Naruto sat in shock… Half because of what she said, and half because he felt her _using chakra_ while she was speaking about those things she couldn't possibly know. He kept thinking that this girl might some kind of weird kunoichi. He tried not to let his excitement show. Whatever she was, she was insane, or at least near enough for government work. Still, she was easily the most coherent patient he had met in this place so far. It was just his luck that the place they felt best for him was a mental hospital. He recognized that it made sense, though. Who here would believe that he was actually from the past, and that the Alliance was holding him to gather information for a bunch of anthropologists and scientists?

"You know some interesting things, girl. What's your name? I learned a long time ago that it's only polite to give your name when someone introduces themselves," said Naruto.

The dark haired girl smiled a beatific smile that lit up her face. Naruto decided that despite her insanity she was easily one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. She giggled lightly, a tinkling sound that made a shiver go down his spine. He realized how long it had been since he had seen a girl near his age. "I am River; River Tam. I really want green eggs and ham," she sang in a little-girl voice. Naruto couldn't help but chuckle lightly at her antics. She really was pleasant to talk to, for someone so crazy.

Suddenly River's jovial mood was gone, and her face became as somber as a dawn funeral. Her voice transformed into a harsh whisper. "I need to leave here, terrible things happen. So much pain, so many experiments. Tomorrow they are going to cut open my brain again, I know it, I know it. Please please please help me please. Oh, God, please. You can do it, you can help. Oh, I miss Simon. " She burst into tears, and turned her head sideways to cry into her arm. With the hair swept back behind her ear, Naruto could see faint lines on the skin of her head. Old scars. A shock went down his spine. All doubts that River Tam was merely insane left him in an instant.

Suddenly the ninja's eyes took on a new look, a sharper look. His brain switched from the "civilian mode" it had been in for the past year, and he used his old, new eyes to _really_ take a look around him. Suddenly the other patients didn't look so much like the mentally ill, but like tortured prisoners who had lost the will to live. The lone orderly suddenly didn't look so kind. And the hermetically sealed steel doors made a lot more sense. This wasn't a mental hospital; it was some kind of insane prison, where the captors were allowed to experiment on the captives. He had thought himself a special case, considering his circumstances, but it looked like they had actually been taking it easy on him. If they were willing to drill into the skull of a sixteen year old girl, and then let him see evidence of it, he doubted that they were ever going to let him free.

Naruto decided then and there to get out of this abattoir masquerading as a hospital before they did anything else to him, or to the still-crying girl sitting next to him. And he planned to take River Tam with him.

~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~

Author's Note: Wai! I decided to make this a Naruto/River fic, possibly a three-way with Naruto, River and Kaylee, as I can't see Simon being a major player in this little tale, as he's not going to get a chance to break River out. Being a good, if slightly insane, sister, she will of course write to her sibling from time to time, to tell him what kind of hijinks she's getting up to. I'm thinking that Naruto will take the place of Simon in the crew of Serenity. I'll leave the details to future chapters, but it should be fine. Out of all the characters, Simon was probably the least influential to the plot. If there's enough demand, though, I'll add him.

I'm really having fun writing this, I love both Firefly and Naruto, so it's a blast. I got so many story alerts, favorites, and author alerts for the first chapter, but only four reviews… Please let me know if you like reading this, as that motivates me to write more, in a big way. To encourage you, I will open up a poll: Should I make this a mini-harem with Naruto/River/Kaylee, or should I focus strictly on a Naruto/River pairing? Ciao until next time.


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